Countering the ‘fake news’ of food: The role of chemometrics with vibrational spectroscopy techniques

Fraud is a billion dollar business which affect the food industry worldwide. The concerns on this practice are not limited to financial repercussions to the manufacture company, but also with the use of inferior quality materials of the adulterated products as these products can severely influence human health. Recently, considerable scientific effort has been devoted to creating robust and reliable methodologies of analysis to be implemented. The need for rapid, accurate and sensitive detection methods to detect and monitor adulterations in foods has been one of the main objectives in the food industry. Vibrational spectroscopy and the role of chemometrics in extracting chemically-relevant information have led to the development of several applications in the field of fraud adulteration.